Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Is Pinterest the 'Twitter' of the visually-inclined?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but no one ever asks which words (we do at Capsule, and the answer is rather valuable, but that's for another day). This one is about Pinterest.

Hadn't we all been waiting for Pinterest? I know those of us who are visually-inclined definitely were. And further filtered, those visually talented (read: those having an eye for beauty in design or aesthetics) were certainly waiting for Pinterest as well, even if they hadn't expressed it, or even recognized its absence in their daily social media consumption.

Consider another popular form of social media facilitation: Twitter. The word-based application restricts your message to 140-characters, and though it allows the dissemination of images along with your text, that part of it was clearly an afterthought. That, and it's design usually corrals followers into seeing the message first, before the picture.

Personally, this is my preferred method of reading. Almost like riding a roller coaster from hell, my reading style starts on the visual side before going deep into then subject matter, then back out to the visual story. Then repeat. It's just my way of processing information. So you could say Pinterest was designed for me—and I'm not the only one.

Try this as an exercise in consuming content.

Browse your Twitter stream. Read each message and see how many you get through in 30 minutes. Then browse your Pinterest stream and see how many you get through in 30 minutes. Which did you enjoy more? In which did you learn more? Which would you spend more time in?

When I did this exercise, Pinterest held my interest much, much longer. And as an information consumer, my appetite was satisfied for a much larger portion of the day.